Discovering Art in the Shadows at Lion Sands
MORE Collection
Updated
October 26, 2026
At Lion Sands Ivory Lodge, artist Hester Badenhorst discovers inspiration in the shifting shadows of the bushveld.
Ivory Lodge
Intimate and elegant, with eight spacious suites that create grounded spaces for deeply personal safari experiences rooted in the Sabie River.
Check datesA plant’s shadow rarely stays where it is for long. As the sun moves, its edges shift, its proportions change, and over time, the composition quietly disappears.
During a month at the Artist’s Residence at Lion Sands Ivory Lodge, South African artist Hester Badenhorst had time to notice these subtle changes. She began to see that shadows were far from simple silhouettes. Each held its own texture, scale, and even rhythm, shifting gently with the breeze. “All the art elements are there,” she says. “My task was to try to capture them.”
For an artist accustomed to working across different materials and methods, this passing play between light and flora opened an absorbing new line of exploration. These observations eventually took form in Moonshadow, a series of artworks created during her residency.
The freedom to observe outside the daily time trap
Based in Pretoria, Hester is a contemporary mixed-media artist with an unusual technical background. Alongside her art, she has spent three decades working in Geographic Information Systems. Maps, aerial imagery, contours, recycled materials, and written information all appear in her broader creative practice, producing richly layered works that explore identity, social change, and our relationship with place.
Having taken many safaris in the past, Hester is well acquainted with the wilderness and many of South Africa’s wild animals. What she had rarely experienced was the luxury of studying the flora of a natural area over an extended period.
The Artist Residency temporarily removed what she calls the “daily time traps” of ordinary life. Feeling more relaxed and focused helped her sustain her energy and work for longer hours. It also gave her the freedom to observe without needing every observation to lead somewhere immediately.
The abundant birdlife and close wildlife encounters naturally drew her attention. Yet the plants - and particularly their shadows - began to hold it.
Seen quickly, a shadow may appear flat and monochromatic. Seen through Hester’s eyes, it contained all the relationships that give an artwork its form. Light translated stems and leaves into shape, pattern and movement, producing compositions that would shift and change as the sun moved.
Eye to eye: The meeting of curious minds
The plants were not the only inhabitants of Lion Sands to enter Hester’s creative world. One morning, a warthog wandered unexpectedly close to where she was working at Ivory Lodge. Its tusks initially made her wary, but the animal made no move towards her. It simply stood still and watched. Hester later learnt that the warthog was accustomed to seeing people in the area, and she came to understand its curiosity. While she had been studying the animal and assessing its intentions, perhaps it had also been studying her.
A vervet monkey ventured even closer, inside the studio itself: a curious visitor entering the space where Hester was observing and interpreting the world outside.
These encounters encouraged her to think about the exchange taking place whenever human and animal lives meet, eye to eye. “We are inquisitive about each other,” Hester reflects. For an artist, that idea gently shifts the familiar relationship between observer and subject. The gaze doesn’t always travel in one direction. Sometimes, the observer is being observed too.
Inside the bushveld cocoon
Asked how she would title her time at Lion Sands, Hester chose “The Bushveld Cocoon”. This captures the particular combination of comfort, safety and proximity she experienced at Ivory Lodge. Her days could include work in the studio, game drives, walks, and encounters with the surrounding wildlife, all set in an environment where she felt protected and at ease.
There was something unusual about feeling so comfortable in a landscape alive with wild animals. Yet, within her cocoon, the wilderness never felt entirely outside. Every so often, it slipped across the threshold: a shaft of African sunlight falling across an unfinished canvas, a fluttering moth drawn to lamplight at dusk, or the sound of animals moving through the bush just beyond the deck.
The windows that shape us
The Moonshadow series has its roots in Hester’s own childhood. As a little girl, she would lie in bed watching moon-shadows move across her bedroom wall. In her imagination, they became brave heroines or mysterious villains, but she always felt safe within her home.
The window frames incorporated into the artworks came from that childhood home. To Hester, they represent the people and places that protect and shape us, and eventually give us the confidence to step into the unknown. Their meaning has changed with her: what once represented the love and protection of home later felt like something to escape. Years later, motherhood brought a different understanding of love: a balance between protecting someone and giving them the freedom to explore.
At Ivory Lodge, those memories returned. Hester could experience the beauty of the bush at close range while still feeling protected – much like looking through her childhood window and knowing that adventure waited beyond it.
Hester hopes the works encourage viewers to think of the windows in their own lives: the people, places or moments that made them feel safe enough to grow and brave enough to explore. Each person’s history will shape what the imagery makes them feel, and she does not expect everyone to arrive at the same interpretation. She hopes only that the response will be personal and strongly felt.
Small wilderness moments, seen forever
Hester now hopes to share these works widely while continuing to develop her growing Trame Verbale collection. She’s particularly interested in exploring how the method might work through alternative photographic processes, including cyanotypes and pinhole-camera images.
Her message to artists who have the opportunity to spend time at Lion Sand Game Reserve is characteristically simple: “This residency makes you free from daily time traps. Use it to relax and focus purely on your art and nature.”
For Hester, that freedom brought the smallest details into view. Once she had time to keep looking, a shadow passing across a surface became a composition, and small moments that might otherwise have gone unseen were given a way to be seen forever.
Interested in purchasing artwork by our featured artists at Lion Sands Ivory Lodge? Contact justin@lionsands.com
The Artist Residency at Lion Sands welcomes established and emerging artists to live and work at Ivory Lodge and Narina Lodge. Curated in partnership with the Southern African Foundation and Fellowship for Contemporary Art (SAFFCA), the residency gives artists time and space to create in the wilderness, while inviting guests to meet the artists and experience their work as it takes shape.
Ivory Lodge
Intimate and elegant, with eight spacious suites that create grounded spaces for deeply personal safari experiences rooted in the Sabie River.
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